Most good novelists have been women or homosexuals. The novel is the triumphant evolved creation, one increasingly has to think, o...f these two groups, who have cooperated more closely in this domain than in any other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

When the excessively shy force themselves to be forward, they are frequently surprisingly unsubtle and overdirect and even rude: t...hey have entered an extreme region beyond their normal personality, an area of social crime where gradations don't count; unavailable to them are the instincts and taboos that booming extroverts, who know the territory of self-advancement far better, can rely on.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally ...apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Friends, both the imaginary ones you build for yourself out of phrases taken from a living writer, or real ones from college, and ...relatives, despite all the waste of ceremony and fakery and the fact that out of an hour of conversation you may have only five minutes in which the old entente reappears, are the only real means for foreign ideas to enter your brain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »